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Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

Latitudes' "out of office" 2014–2015 season

It's that end-of-the-season time of the year again. It has become a tradition for Latitudes (see the 2008-9, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012–13, 2013–14 posts) to mark the summer break, not by presenting a written memo of activities or a financial statement, but with a 'behind the scenes' post filled with photos revisiting moments from the year gone by. So here are some glimpses from September 2014 to August 2015.

Slowing down is rather relative this Summer, as at the end of July we embarked on a two-week trip to The Banff Centre in Canada to be Guest Faculty of one of its thematic residencies, 'Blueprint for Happiness' led by British artists Heather & Ivan Morison. At the end of August, we will be in residency at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco for another two weeks. 

Milestones during the first part of 2015 were two-fold: after months of technical tweaking and editorial wrangling, we launched our newly designed website in February and secondly, this Spring Latitudes celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Have a great holiday, más en septiembre! 

7 October 2014: Latitudes hosted the second year students of the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London, and took the opportunity of presenting and reflecting on our collaborations with three Catalan artists – Martí Anson, Ignasi Aballí and Francesc Ruiz

 Francesc Ruiz presenting his work to the RCA students.

Trip reporting: We reported from the field including at Madrid's Apertura in September, London's Frieze week in October, David Jablonowski's "Hype Cycle" at Fons Welters during Amsterdam's Art Weekend in November, and from Bordeaux in January, to Bari in May.

Writing: This year Max Andrews has joined frieze as Contributing Editor – where he has been writing since 2004. His writing has been more frequent in recent months as frieze have published reviews on Maria Thereza Alves at CAAC in Sevilla, the group show "What cannot be used is forgotten" at CAPC Bordeaux, a profile of Nicholas Mangan and a review of the Spanish and Latin American Pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Mariana Cánepa Luna also published an interview with Mangan in Mousse Magazine last February.

New website: Our homemade website finally saw the light of day in February. As explained in this post, the website features new elements such as the 'Cover Story' (more on that in the next paragraph), sliding photo galleries, a tidied-up sidebar with a calendar of events, tags to filter projects by 'year' or 'exhibition', etc.

'Cover Story': More writing has emerged through the new monthly section "Cover Story" on our home page (check out the archive of this section):

March 2015: Focused on a single artwork: Wilfredo Prieto's ‘Grasa, jabón y plátano’ (2006); 

April 2015: Revisited a peculiar site: the Connaught Road West flyover, in Hong Kong;


April 2015 Cover Story.

May 2015: Honoured two artistazos: Lawrence Weiner and Sergi Aguilar and a whisky-enhanced chat on the Barcelona shore in October 2008; 


June 2015: Visited Ignasi Aballí at his Raval studio.

Summer 2015: Orbited around Australian artist Nicholas Mangan, an artist with whom Latitudes just did an in conversation in the context of his solo exhibition "Ancient Lights" at Chisenhale, London and whose work has been the focus in Max Andrews' Frieze text as well as in Mariana Cánepa Luna's interview in the February-March issue of Mousse Magazine


 Summer 2015 Cover Story (plus the archive here).

26 February, ARCOmadrid: On jury duty visiting the galleries participating in the #Opening section of the art fair, in order to select its best stand. The award was given to Barcelona-based gallery etHALL which presented works by Martin Vitaliti and Sergio Prego.

 

Spring, celebration time! Later in May we celebrated our 10th anniversary (well, officially it was in April!) launching a series of limited editions in the form of tote bags by four artists that have a special place in our hearts and with whom we have collaborated with in the past: Lawrence Weiner (New York, 1942), Haegue Yang (Seoul, 1971), Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) and Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975). Below is a glimpse from the making of the tote bags at Print Workers Barcelona, and here's where you can place your order.

 Photolith design for the tote bag by Haegue Yang – realised in collaboration with OK-RM. 
 Silkscreen process of Lawrence Weiner's design. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening Ignasi Aballí's tote. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening Mariana Castillo Deball tote. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening the credit for each bag in the inside pocket. Photo: Print Workers.
Homemade photo studio documenting the totes. Results of the photo shoot here.

9–13 May 2015: After an intense week of Biennale overdose in Venice, we traveled to Bari to join Vessel and MADA's 2015 International Curatorial Retreat as two of its tutors. The week was far from being a retreat, it was more like an "intensive" – though it certainly was a "treat". Highly interesting debates and conversations on-and-off the scheduled activities of lectures and break-out sessions emerged in places such as a cave or in the nearby town Monopoli – no direct link to the property trading board game. Here a report from fellow tutor Dr. Alexandra Ross
  
 Visiting the market. Photo: Piero Percoco.
Market stall selling tomatoes of all kinds and origins.
 Chef Boris Portnoy doing some dinner prep at Doppelgaenger gallery/home.
 Due to a fire in Rome's airport, our flight was cancelled and we had to rearrange our travel, spending another day in Bari. We therefore visited (we were in fact their only visitors) the Palazzo dell'Acquedotto Pugliese di Bari, decorated by roman designer Duilio Cambellotti
A food detour to purchase delightful spicy rucola in the Mercato ex Manifattura Bari, in the Quartiere Libertà.


3–5 June 2015: Max Andrews participated in the annual 'Invest Conference 2015' organised by Stroom den Haag, in The Hague, consisting of "an incentive for the artistic development of recently graduated artists who have received the PRO Invest subsidy in the year before. A group of ten international curators is asked to visit these artists in their studios and meet with the art scene of The Hague." 

  Above (visiting Machteld Rullens) and following photographs by Myung Feyen. Courtesy Stroom den Haag.

7 July 2015: For our last public event of the year we joined Melbourne artist Nicholas Mangan for an in conversation in the context of his solo show 'Ancient Lights' that opened a few days earlier at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Mint and Lime Films video documented the talk – watch it from Chisenhale's website / Vimeo.

Vinyl listing the exhibition events.


 (Above) Photos by Manuela Barczewski.


27 July–7 August 2015: Guest Faculty of the Thematic Residency 'Blueprint for Happiness' at The Banff Centre, Canada. We joined the group in the middle two weeks of the six week programme led by British artists Heather and Ivan Morison

View of The Banff Centre from our bedroom in Lloyd Hall.
Banff TV announcing Latitudes' talk on 28 July, 4pm. 

 Blueprint for Happiness' participants.
 Views from Latitudes' studio in the Jeanne & Peter Lougheed Building.
 Studio visit with "Blueprint for Happiness" participant Vanessa Kwan.
 Studio visit with "Blueprint for Happiness" participant Robert Cram.
Inevitable photo of a deer walking around Banff.
Stunning evening sunset over the Bow River after a storm with a double rainbow.

While in Banff, Latitudes led three seminars bringing forward a series of case studies as well as focussing on a number of artists whose practice has dealt with public space in different geographical contexts. We also undertook studio visits with each of the 11 resident artists, and participated in a field trip to Calgary to visit the HQ of art construction company Heavy Industries and the Esker Foundation Contemporary Art Gallery


 (School) Field trip to Calgary to visit Heavy Industries fabricators and the Esker Foundation. 
 Even though the school bus seats were no longer in scale to our adult bodies, interesting chats happened over the 2 hours of each trajectory.

On Sunday 2 August, Latitudes hosted a closed-door evening film programme screening works by Spanish artist Emilio Moreno, Irish artist Sean Lynch and Australian artist Nicholas Mangan. The three films share a focus on public sculptures, monuments or buildings that have been displaced from their original context. 

 Flicking through some of the 4,000 artist books at Banff library.


Most of this past months' activity has been invested in preparing for 2015–16 projects: Firstly, 'Compositions' a series of five artistic interventions by six artists active in the Barcelona art scene: David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980. Lives in Barcelona); Dora García (Valladolid, 1965. Lives in Barcelona), Jordi Mitjà (Figueres, 1970. Lives between Lladó and Banyoles); Rasmus Nilausen (Copenhagen, 1980. Lives in Barcelona) & Pere Llobera (Barcelona, 1970. Lives in Barcelona) and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), which will take place in the context of the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015). 

Façade of Cosme Toda in L'Hospitalet municipality (Barcelona) part of a 1920s factory complex where David Bestué will present his intervention in the context of the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.
Site visit to the Umbracle with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.


Secondly, we've been working on the forthcoming solo exhibition of Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez which will be on view at La Capella MACBA from March 2016. Onwards!


Digging through documentation in MACBA library in preparation for José Antonio Hernández-Díez exhibition.

RELATED CONTENT:

Latitudes 'Out of office' 2013–14, 31 July 2014;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album, 2012–2013 season, 31 July 2013;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2011–2012, 31 July 2012;
Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2010–11 season, 1 August 2011;
Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2009–10 season, 30 July 2010;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2008-9, 30 July 2009.


This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Tutors of the 2015 International Curatorial Retreat, 9–13 May, Bari (Italy)

Introduction to the four-day workshop by Tara McDowell, director of the Curatorial Practice PhD. Program at MADA (Monash School of Art Design and Architecture), Melbourne.

Organised by Vessel in collaboration with the Curatorial Practice PhD Program at MADA (Monash School of Art Design and Architecture) in Melbourne – which a year ago co-hosted our Melbourne residency as part of Gertrude Contemporary's Visiting Curatorial Program – the retreat brings together participants and tutors in an intense mobile four-day format. 


The 2015 International Curatorial Retreat (9–13 May) focused on issues which have gained urgency within contemporary curatorial practice under the conditions of globalization, in particular, the process of writing when related to the ‘epistemologies of the South’ – a term adopted from Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 

As a member of the team of tutors of the retreat, Latitudes presented two of its recent editorial projects (The Last Newspaper and Incidents of Travel in Mexico and Hong Kong) and led an afternoon workshop titled “Near Future Artworlds Curatorial Foresight Disruption Group” that operated in the realm of "art-fiction", of desirable or dystopian prototypes, speculative objects and art world services, as well as imminent and real (to use the startup term) disruptions. A kind of near-future think tank and foresight group, the workshop imagined curatorial-editorial prototypes and use-case scenarios.

Tirdad Zolghadr during his workshop.

 Alexandra Ross presented http://www.continuous-curatorial-conversations.org/, a "compilation of supplementary histories which appropriately emphasizes the oral nature of curatorial practice".

Photo: Piero Percoco.

Participants (via the open call): Rachel Dedman (1989, London, lives and works in Beirut; Curator-in-Residence, 98weeks, Beirut); Maya Mikelstone (1982, Latvia, lives and works in Paris/Latvia, independent curator); Jesse van Oosten (1986, Rotterdam, lives and works in Rotterdam, Associate Curator, TENT Rotterdam); Heidi Rabben (1982, Laguna Beach, California, lives and works in San Francisco; Assistant Director, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco); Maayan Sheleff (1976, Tel-Aviv, lives and works in Tel-Aviv, independent curator); Eszter Szakács (1983, Mór, Hungary, lives and works in Budapest; curator and researcher at tranzit.hu, Budapest); Christel Vesters (1972, Oldebroek, The Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam; PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Royal College of Art in London). 

Participants from the Curatorial Practice PhD at MADA, Melbourne: Léuli Eshraghi, Sarah Ann Farrar, Rosemary Forde, Melanie Oliver, Joel Stern and Holly Williams. 

Tutors: Tara McDowell (Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at MADA); Dr Alexandra Ross (Postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Curating the Archive at Michaelis Art School, University of Cape Town); Tirdad Zolghadr (Curator and writer currently affiliated with Al Quds Bard College and the International Academy of Art, Ramallah); Fucking Good Art (travelling artists’ magazine or editorial project for research in-and-through art); Vít Havránek (theoretician and organizer based in Prague, co-founder of Tranzitdisplay and Latitudes (independent Barcelona-based curatorial office). 

Light display at the Piazza del Ferrarese during the Feste di San Nicola.

View from the Doppelgaenger Gallery in the old town area, the venue that hosted the seminars.

 Part of the group visited Monopoli for a workshop led by Rob and Nienke of Fucking Good Art.

 Monopoli seafront.

 Walking through the old city centre of Bari on the way to lunch.

 Food shopping at the Mercato ex Manifattura Bari (former tobacco factory) in the Quartiere Libertà.

 Dinner cooked by the International Curatorial Retreat's chef-in-residence Boris Portnoy.

 Photo: Piero Percoco

(Above and below) 'Notes and Quotes' session led by Rob and Nienke of Fucking Good Art, a 'de-briefing'  session that wrapped up the discussions by exchanging notes and quotes drawn from the previous few days.


Final remarks and feedback session. Photo: Piero Percoco.
 
RELATED CONTENT:



This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org
Work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39



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